Knowledge or habits ?

A few years ago I was giving a training on a problem-solving methods in  a factory. I did that training fairly often and over time I developed a special way of teaching it. Generally I encountered a lot of skepticism about it, along the lines, that the method is too theoretical, can not be applied in real life and anyway, we can solve our problems without this fancy  stuff. So, I developed an example, where all the trainees were given the basic facts of a “machine” and were asked to optimize the output . The trick was that they were allowed to run trials, but all trials had a cost, so the winner would be the team with the best output and lowest cost.

It was always fun to watch, as most every team tried several guesses , lost hope, lost track, somehow even repeated the same trial several times and generally failed to get the optimal solution. Then I would show them how, using the method I was training, one can get to the optimum with a minimal number of trials (fast and cheap - if we talk to the management).

This particular time one of the trainees was the chief engineer of the plant, a really smart person. During the exercise he succumbed to the same bad habit of unsystematically trying hunches and his team was no better then the rest. But at the moment I showed them the method to use he cried – Oh, I know this! We already had a training on this method a year ago !

I remember this incident because for several years caused me to seriously doubt what we were doing. If even a very smart person fails to connect what he learned at one training to what he needs in another one (not to mention connecting the training to real life) than what is the point of our work?  Is it really luck? Do we have to wait for those rare people who not only get it but enthusiastically start to apply and promote what they learned ? (And such people DO exist by the way.)  

Today, after having studied and applied Toyota Kata I think I have pretty good answer to my doubts. It concerns the two different meanings of the word training. Having a consultant in a classroom and explaining a method or a methodology is called a training just as well as the regular weekly or daily exercise of all professional sportsmen.  The difference is that in a classroom training we just explain how something should or could be done, sort of building knowledge but the real training happens outside the classroom and the objective of it is to  build habits. Without the right habits knowledge is useless  and classroom training a waste of time.

But how do we acquire good habits? Definitely NOT in a classroom. In trainings I use the example of trying to learn riding a bicycle in the classroom. It will not work. So, acquiring the habits will be a much more difficult and longer term effort. We need to train much less in the sense of information content and than we need to get out of the classroom and exercise that what we learned for a long time, until … , you guessed it …  , it becomes a habit. Once we have the right habits, we can build a further step of knowledge acquisition on this, and we will hopefully need less time to turn that knowledge into the right habits, and then acquire new knowledge and so on without end.

This is still a nice theory, though. How do we do this in practice ? We start with a short, unspectacular classroom training concerning Toyota Kata, explaining that the final goal is to build the habit of identifying problems and solving them in the day to day activity of the organization. Then we actually start doing exactly this, using just a few, selected, tools like team boards and PDCA-s. Not because they are the best tools to solve problems but because they the best tools to form habits. Once the habits are in place we can build the knowledge of better, more specialized tools, for more complex problems (like value stream mappings, SMED and all the more sophisticated Lean tools). Because the habits of problem identification and solving are already in place, there is a good chance that the new tools will integrate into the daily routines as well and we will never have smart people recognizing a tool only after they failed to apply it.

As I explained this concept to the quality leader of a company we were working for, he was a bit surprised.

– Oh, I see where you are going – he said finally. – But this is  much more difficult than simply delivering a specialized training on problem solving or SMED!

Yes, he is right. This is tough, because our job does not end when we leave the classroom, it actually starts at that moment. But I know, I would not prefer it in any other way.  

Acknowledgement - the picture was generated using hotpot.ai